The economic recovery of natural resources such as oil is extremely difficult. Prediction of the flow in a reservoir is important in determining a production plan. Accurately predicting the flow in a reservoir for the production plan can make the difference between a successful well and an uneconomical well.
Seismic surveys may be used to collect rock and soil information that may in turn be used to locate faults and estimate fluid flow in the substrata. When different types of substrata meet (for example, at a discontinuity), determining the behavior of fluids across the boundary is problematic. Known approaches are either costly and difficult to implement or inaccurately approximate a fault geometry. In such prior techniques, estimations or assumptions may be used to fix the data such that a calculation can be completed. However, this introduces numerical errors up to and including inadvertent modelling of non-physical behaviors. In a grid based approach to modelling the substrata, a discontinuity in the substrata typically leads to a discontinuity in the grid, which makes computing the flow across the discontinuity extremely difficult.
Accordingly, methods and systems for accurate analysis, such as flow simulation, across discontinuities is desirable.